1. Vanessa Place —The High Creator does not create.
2. Kenneth Goldsmith —Death to the “creative” once and for all.
3. Simon Armitage —Best known for 9/11 poem, wins Oxford Poetry Professorship
4. A.E. Stallings —Lost the Oxford. World is still waiting for a good New Formalist poet.
5. John Ashbery —Doesn’t need to be good. Unlike New Formalists, his content and form agree.
6. Marjorie Perloff —Must confront this question: is the “non-creative” nearly racist by default?
7. Ron Silliman —Keeps tabs on the dying. Burned by the Avant Racism scandal.
8. Stephen Burt —Stephanie goes to Harvard.
9. Rita Dove —We asked her about Perloff; she laughed. No intellectual pretense.
10. Claudia Rankine —Social confrontation as life and death.
11. Juan Felipe Herrera —New U.S. Poet Laureate. MFA from Iowa. Farm workers’ son.
12. William Logan —“Shakespeare, Pope, Milton by fifth grade.” In the Times. He’s trying.
13. Patricia Lockwood —“Rape Joke” went Awl viral.
14. Lawrence Ferlinghetti —At 96, last living Beat.
15. Richard Wilbur —At 94, last living Old Formalist.
16. Don Share —Fuddy-duddy or cutting edge? It’s impossible to tell with Poetry.
17. Valerie Macon —Good poet. Hounded from NC Laureate job for lacking creds.
18. Helen Vendler —New book of essays a New Critical tour de force. Besotted with Ashbery and Graham.
19. Cathy Park Hong —Fighting the racist Avant Garde.
20. David Lehman —As the splintering continues, his BAP seems less and less important.
21. Billy Collins —His gentle historical satire is rhetoric nicely fitted to free verse.
22. David Orr —Common sense critic at the Times.
23. Frank Bidart —Student of Lowell and Bishop, worked with James Franco. Drama. Confessionalism.
24. Kevin Coval —Co-editor of Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop.
25. Philip Nikolayev —Globe-trotting translator, editor, poet.
26. Ben Mazer —Neo-Romantic. Has advanced past Hart Crane.
27. Amy King —–Hates mansplaining.
28. Sharon Olds —Best living female poet?
29. Louise Gluck —Her stock is quietly rising.
30. Jorie Graham —Her Collected has landed.
31. George Bilgere —If you like Billy Collins…and what’s wrong with that?
32. Garrison Keillor —Is he retiring?
33. Kent Johnson —Is his Prize List so quickly forgotten?
34. David Biespiel —One of the villagers trying to chase Conceptualism out of town.
35. Carol Ann Duffy —The “real” Poet Laureate—she’s Brih-ish.
36. Cate Marvin —Poet who leads the VIDA hordes.
37. Lyn Hejinian —The best Language Poet?
38. Dan Chiasson —New Yorker house critic.
39. Michael Robbins —As with Logan, we vastly prefer the criticism to the poetry.
40. Joe Green —His Selected, The Loneliest Ranger, has been recently published.
41. Harold Bloom —The canonizer.
42. Dana Gioia —The best of New Formalism.
43. Seth Abramson —Meta-Modernism. That dog won’t hunt.
44. Henry Gould —Better at responding than asserting; reflecting the present state of Criticism today.
45. W.S. Merwin —Knew Robert Graves—who recommended mushroom eating (yea, that kind of mushroom) as Oxford Poetry Professor in the 60s.
46. Marilyn Chin —Passionate lyricist of “How I Got That Name.”
47. Anne Carson —“The Glass Essay” is a confessional heartbreak.
48. Terrence Hayes —Already a BAP editor.
49. Timothy Steele —Another New Formalist excellent in theorizing—but too fastidious as a poet.
50. Natasha Trethewey —Was recently U.S. Poet Laureate for two terms.
51. Tony Hoagland —Hasn’t been heard from too much since his tennis poem controversy.
52. Camille Paglia —Aesthetically, she’s too close to Harold Bloom and the New Critics.
53. William Kulik —Kind of the Baudelaire plus Hemingway of American poetry. Interesting, huh?
54. Mary Oliver —Always makes this list, and we always mumble something about “Nature.”
55. Robert Pinsky —He mentored VIDA’s Erin Belieu.
56. Alan Cordle —We will never forget how Foetry.com changed the game.
57. Cole Swensen –A difficult poet’s difficult poet.
58. Charles Bernstein —One day Language Poetry will be seen for what it is: just another clique joking around.
59. Charles Wright —Pulitzer in ’98, Poet Laureate in ’14.
60. Paul Muldoon —New Yorker Nights
61. Geoffrey Hill —The very, very difficult school.
62. Derek Walcott —Our time’s Homer?
63. Janet Holmes —Program Era exemplar.
64. Matthew Dickman —The youth get old. Turning 40.
65. Kay Ryan —Are her titles—“A Ball Rolls On A Point”—better than her poems?
66. Laura Kasischke —The aesthetic equivalent of Robert Penn Warren?
67. Nikki Finney —NAACP Image Award
68. Louis Jenkins —His book of poems, Nice Fish, is a play at the American Repertory Theater this winter.
69. Kevin Young —A Stenger Fellow who studied with Brock-Broido and Heaney at Harvard
70. Timothy Donnelly —His Cloud Corporation made a big splash.
71. Heather McHugh —Her 2007 BAP guest editor volume is one of the best.
72. D.A. Powell —Stephen Burt claims he is original and accessible to an extraordinary degree.
73. Eileen Myles —We met her on the now-defunct Blog Harriet Public Form.
74. Richard Howard —Pulitzer-winning essayist, critic, translator and poet
75. Robert Hass —U.S. Poet Laureate in the 90s, a translator of haiku and Milosz.
76. Rae Armantrout —Emily Dickinson of the Avant Garde?
77. Peter Gizzi —His Selected, In Defense of Nothing, came out last year.
78. Fanny Howe —Is it wrong to think everything is sacred? An avant-garde Catholic.
79. Robert Archambeau —His blog is Samizdat. Rhymes with Scarriet.
80. X.J. Kennedy —Keeping the spirit of Frost alive.
81. Robert Polito —Poetry man.
82. David Ferry —Classical poetry translator.
83. Mark Doty —A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
84. Al Filreis —Co-founder of PennSound
85. Frederick Seidel —Has been known to rhyme malevolence with benevolence.
86. Sherman Alexie —Is taught in high school. We wonder how many on this list are?
87. Marie Howe —Margaret Atwood selected her first book for a prize.
88. Carol Muske-Dukes —In recent Paris Review interview decried cutting and pasting of “Unoriginal Genius.”
89. Martha Ronk —In the American Hybrid anthology from Norton.
90. Juliana Spahr —Has a PhD from SUNY Buffalo. Hates “capitalism.”
91. Patricia Smith —Four-time winner of the National Poetry Slam.
92. Dean Young —His New & Selected, Bender, was published in 2012.
93. Jennifer Knox —Colloquial and brash.
94. Alicia Ostriker —“When I write a poem, I am crawling into the dark.”
95. Yusef Komunyakaa —Known for his Vietnam poems.
96. Stephen Dunn —His latest work is Lines of Defense: Poems.
97. Thomas Sayer Ellis —Poet and photographer.
98. Carolyn Forche —Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University.
99. Margaret Atwood —Poet, novelist, and environmental activist.
100. Forrest Gander —The Trace is his latest.
